Michelle Hanchey 4 Comments

Unleash Your Leadership Potential

Personal leadership development

The corner stone of your leadership strategy is to know yourself and to make your self- development a high priority.

Personal development is a lifelong mission that is never complete. When you take the time to assess yourself and think about how you would like to grow, doors start opening.

The most successful people are not people who rely on their raw talent – they are people who continue to grow throughout their lifetime through conscious choice.

Your personal development begins with a hard look at where you are, your strengths, and where you can improve. Personal assessments can be an incredibly helpful tool in this process. A professional assessment gives you an outside perspective on your work style, your values, and your communication skills.

Every leader has a different style, different life experiences and a unique outlook.  The better you understand yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, the better you will be to lead others as well as give them the tools they need to better understand themselves.

Beside personal assessments, you can utilize reading materials, as well as attend leadership workshops.  Getting together with similar people will inspire commitment and creativity which in turn boosts your efforts.

Here are a few more of the personal skills that will prepare you as a leader:

  1. Develop your EQ (emotional intelligence). People with high emotional intelligence (EQ) are consistently the top performers in their organizations. They are more resilient and flexible when things get tough. They are held in the highest regard by their bosses, peers, co-workers and others. When faced with pressure and stress can you handle it, stay poised, calm, and effective no matter what.
  2. A strategic leader has strong abilities to communicate
  3. Hone your ability to listen. Too many leaders are full of themselves and think they have all the solutions and then wonder why their people are not engaged and do not perform well.
  4. Develop strong self-management skills and organizational
  5. Foresight is a skill that comes with practice in working through all potential outcomes. This skill will help you and your team make plans 3 months, 6 months, or a year or more in advance. The key is knowing how to design a winning strategy, and how to execute it effectively using foresight.
  6. Tenacity is a skill that enables the leader to push through when things go wrong.

“You don’t become a leader in a classroom. Leadership is earned on the basis of people who choose to follow you. It’s not granted or anointed by some holy water granted in a school,” according to Harvard Business School Journal.

One of the best places to safely apply what you learn as a leader is the international non-profit organization called Toastmasters.  Here you can hone leadership skills, learn new skills and have a community of people who are working to become the best version of themselves while helping others do the same.

 

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5 Levels of Leadership

5 Levels of Leadership

–  review

Everybody’s a leader. It doesn’t matter if you are in kindergarten or retired – whatever position in life  — a mother, a father, a friend, a brother—you are a leader in some way, shape or form.

We should all be learning how to be better leaders.

There are several stages of leadership. You can’t just skip to the final stage of leadership; rather, you have to go through the stages, and if you know what the stages are and if you know that the levels exist, you can navigate through them and become a successful leader.

I like John Maxwell’s book The 5 Levels of Leadership because it begins with the premise that the purpose of leadership is to produce more leaders and to help each person move toward the highest level of leadership they can reach. Then he lists and explains the five levels of leadership that he has seen and experienced.

The 5 Levels of Leadership are:
1. Position – People follow because they have to.
2. Permission – People follow because they want to.
3. Production – People follow because of what you have done for the organization.
4. People Development – People follow because of what you have done for them personally.
5. Pinnacle – People follow because of who you are and what you represent.

Maxwell uses humor, in-depth insight, and examples as he describes each of these stages of leadership. He shows you how to master each level and rise up to the next to become a more influential, respected, and successful leader.

“No matter where you are in your leadership, remember, what got you to where you are can get you ahead of the next level.” John C. Maxwell

In this book, John Maxwell explains further by stating ten (10) insights to help people understand these leadership levels. The insights are:

  1. You can move upper level but you must never leave the previous level behind.
  2. You are not on the same level with every person. You may be at level two with your family at home but level 3 with your employees at work.
  3. The higher you go, the easier it gets for you to lead.
  4. The higher you go the more time and commitment is required to win a level. There is no easy way to get up.
  5. Moving up the levels goes slowly but going down goes easily.
  6. The higher you go the greater the returns.
  7. Moving further always require further growth. Every risk at a higher level is a natural extension of what the leaders have by then developed.
  8. Not climbing the levels limits you and your people. If your leadership is a 4 out of 10, you effectiveness would be nothing more than 4.
  9. When you change positions or organizations, you seldom stay at the same level.
  10. And finally, you cannot climb the level alone.

“The goal of life is not to live forever; the goal of life is to leave something that would live forever.”

John C. Maxwell